In order to take articles into and out of an article storage facility in cooperation with, for example, a stacker crane, a transport device is utilized which includes a conveyor for transporting a transported object along a transport direction, and a plurality of movable guide rails provided at a plurality of locations along the lateral width direction. For example, JP Publication of Application No. 2003-192105 (Patent Document 1) discloses a transport device (carrying-in-or-out conveyor device 1) which includes a pair of conveyors (chain-conveyor devices 1), a pair of movable guide rails (movable guides 13) which can be vertically moved, and a pair of fixed guide rails (fixed guides 12), with one movable guide rail as well as one fixed guide rail located on each side of the pair of conveyors. When transporting a transported object having a large width, the movable guide rails are lowered and the transported object is guided by the pair of fixed guide rails whereas, when transporting a transported object having a small width, the movable guide rails are raised and the transported object is guided by the pair of movable guide rails.
In the transport device of Patent Document 1, a separate raising-and-lowering mechanism is independently provided for each pair of movable guide rails to raise and lower the movable guide rails. Therefore, a relatively large number of actuators are required, which lead to an increase in size and cost of the transport device. Especially when the number of movable guide rails needs to be increased to handle transported objects of various sizes, the number of necessary actuators also increases as the number of the movable guide rails increases, which makes the problem described above worse.